In the video above, pianist Garrick Ohlsson speaks about Alexander Scriabin’s musical language and performs Scriabin’s “Desir,” Op.57, No.1 and “Two Pieces,” Op.59. Allan Kozinn of the New York Times was quite impressed:
An all-Scriabin recital requires fingers, fortitude and an imagination freewheeling enough to follow Scriabin’s own peculiar sense of fantasy. Garrick Ohlsson brought those essentials to his overview of Scriabin’s piano music on Saturday evening at the 92nd Street Y. Mr. Ohlsson was apparently worried that this composer remains a rarefied taste: in an interview printed in the program he described Scriabin as “definitely foie gras in a generally meat-and-potatoes world.” But a large audience turned up to bask in the music’s hazy, chromatic glow…
Probably the most striking quality of Mr. Ohlsson’s performance was his uncanny way of finding a disquieting electricity not only in big extroverted works like the Sonatas Nos. 5 and 10, both tidal waves in Mr. Ohlsson’s hands, but also in more ethereal scores like the meditative “Désir” (Op. 57, No. 1) and the almost Debussian “Vers la Flamme” (Op. 72).
